ABSTRACT
The science fiction of an artificial flying insect buzzing around your office, suddenly deciding to escape through the door and managing to reach your colleague’s room is a futuristic scenario that this book humbly contributed to bring closer to reality. The 10-gram microflyer demonstrated autonomous operation using only visual, gyroscopic and anemometric sensors. The signal processing and control were carried out entirely on-board, despite the plane’s very limited payload of approximately 4 g. This has been made possible by developing ultra-light optic-flow detectors and fitting the algorithms (optic-flow detection and airplane control) in a tiny 8-bit microcontroller. The whole software running on the airplane used only a few thousand bytes of program memory. In flight, the airplane consumed less than 2W, which is 30 times less than a desk light. Along a slightly different line, the blimp permitted the use of an evolutionary technique to automatically develop embedded neuromorphic controllers. This buoyant robot required only 1 W to autonomously circumnavigate the test arena while avoiding collisions with walls.
